Even though the US and Western Europe are more or less in alignment, sometimes I feel the dates of certain turnings differ slightly depending on what side of the pond you're on. For instance, even if the American 2T lasted from 1965-1980, in Western Europe I think it was more late fifties to mid-seventies rather than mid sixties to early eighties like in the US. So if anything, Europe had a really f***ing long 3T. In Western Europe the "Sixties" were basically over before they officially ended according to the calendar whereas they lasted until about 1973 in the US. Or maybe it was only France and Italy who experienced their respective 2Ts ahead of schedule, say from 1959-1975, whereas the UK and Germany experienced theirs at roughly the same time as the US. I don't know...

But I think it's safe to say the 2T officially ended in Italy the night Pier Paolo Pasolini got murdered.

I hereby start a new thread on the reproduction of sound (largely music for its own sake)  here and now.

This WaPo article provides some clues.

We had speculated on the old forum regarding which of the two generations would end up as the least fecund in US history.

Millies are now challenging X in a big way.

Older Xer women have hit or will soon hit menopause. So Xers' window of fecundity is shrinking day by day.

Millies still have time to get going, but their window will get more and more compressed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk...than-ever/

I saw this article about the fact that a song by the Beastie Boys is in Star Trek Beyond. Here is the URL: http://www.app.com/story/entertainment/m.../88301134/

Here is the article:

Quote:By most measures, the latest in the “Star Trek” franchise, “Star Trek: Beyond,” is a really good movie. It may not be perfect, but critics like it because, for one thing, it develops the individual characters, while remaining a balanced ensemble piece.

Audiences like it because, overall, it remains a breezy, over-the-top action film (with one of the best and longest spacecraft-destruction sequences ever).


But, predictably, the part I loved the most was the use of pop music woven into both the soundtrack and the drama itself. (Spoiler alert: I don’t think I’m giving too much away, but just the same, if you haven’t seen the film and plan to, you might want to stop right here and come back after you have.)

In a critical moment, the crew assaults the enemy with a destructive high-frequency signal consisting of a recording found on an abandoned starship from Earth: The Beastie Boys’ song “Sabotage.”

That made me smile, but what made me laugh out loud were the reactions of Karl Urban’s character, Dr. McCoy, who asks, “Is that classical music?” and Spock, played by Zachary Quinto, who responds, “Yes, I believe it is.”

Spock is, of course, half alien, but also an expert on human society and cultural history. He’s intensely logical and rarely ironic. So are we to believe “Sabotage” is regarded as classical music in the 23rd century? Yes, we are, and frankly, I have no problem with that.

More than 200 years from now, after the messy dust of contemporary culture, with all its stylistic boundaries and bruising biases, settles to the ground of history, some culture that today seems largely commercial and crass will be highly regarded.

The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Prince, almost certainly. Public Enemy (also featured in the film) and the Beastie Boys? Hard to tell from here, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

Before you dismiss the idea, be aware that this has happened many times throughout history. The popular entertainment of Greek tragedies became the foundation of all modern theater. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was dependent on the love of common Londoners, especially those willing to pay a penny each to stand in a crowded pack in the unroofed yard in front of the stage for an entire three-hour drama.

Most of Charles Dickens’ novels were published in installments by popular magazines — he even used an early form of crowdsourcing, writing subsequent chapters to incorporate (or disregard) suggestions from readers.

In classical music, the 12th-century songs of the troubadours were a profane diversion well outside the liturgical music that would serve as the foundation of the classical tradition. But it would influence that tradition in many powerful ways. Likewise, the waltz, the string quartet and wind ensemble all originated as popular entertainment and were later developed into high art forms.

Originally regarded as a debauched style that appealed to base instincts, ragtime found a foothold early in classical music circles through its influence on Stravinsky, and has continued to rise in the estimation of musicologists, easily outliving and transcending its critics.


Similarly, the tango and bossa nova have moved out of the club to be embraced by the concert hall. Today popular artists are pushing their styles deeper into serious art, such as Bjork, Radiohead and rap artist Kendrick Lamar, to name just a few.

On the other side, composers like Leonard Bernstein and Kurt Weill recognized the gray area between classical and popular Broadway forms, and sought to colonize it. Their counterparts today are busy with similar explorations of rock and hip-hop styles, including violinist Daniel Roumain, guitarist Gene Pritsker and Princeton University composer Steve Mackey.

But with the “Star Trek” selections, maybe it is the troubadours that are the best precedent. Their poetry was full of ideology and elevated love beyond the rule of law. Yes, the idea of the Brooklyn rappers as tomorrow’s long hairs made me laugh.

But if the troubadours, with their politics, their poetry and their deliberate attempt to appeal to a popular audience could be remembered, revered and imitated 800 years later, the notion of primal, angry, anti-establishment hip-hop artistry doing the same seems not so far-fetched.

This is what good science fiction always does: it paints a picture of the future in the outline of the present day. It places our current experience into the broader context of history, and makes us look at ourselves afresh.

Maybe in this, “Star Trek” itself is destined to become an example of a kind of classical literature.

I have found this article that I think you might be interested in. Here is the URL: http://www.vox.com/2016/8/11/12426346/trump-polls-today

Here is the article:

Quote:As you’re surely aware by now, most polls taken after the conventions ended have shown Hillary Clinton surging to a sizable lead over Donald Trump. But write-ups of these polls have often been accompanied by the caveat that polling is volatile in the immediate wake of the conventions. A bounce for a candidate might not end up lasting.
So when, you might wonder, should we really start trusting the polls again?

The answer: right about now.
We are two weeks out from the final day of the Democratic convention. And according to historical research by political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, this is usually the time that the convention fog finally lifts and the polls become more predictive.
"Although the convention season is the time for multiple bounces in the polls, one party ends up with an advantage when the dust clears. And this gain is a net convention bump rather than a bounce," Erikson and Wlezien write in their book The Timeline of Presidential Elections.
That is, once the volatility dies down, one candidate usually emerges from the convention chaos with a durable lead. And almost always, the political scientists find, that candidate goes on to win the election.
Polling two weeks after the convention tends to look a lot more like the eventual outcome
According to Erikson and Wlezien’s research and analysis of historical data, two important things tend to happen around this point in the campaign.
First, the post-convention polling chaos settles down, and the polls become more stable. And second, the polls that start to come out now tend to be much more predictive of the eventual outcome than pre-convention polls were.

Take a look at this graph from the authors’ 2012 book, The Timeline of Presidential Elections.

The language here is technical, but here’s what you’re seeing:

• On the Y-axis is, essentially, a measure of how closely the polling at a certain point is to the eventual outcome. The higher a point is, the more predictive polling at that date is.
  
• Then, the X-axis displays when the polls were taken in relation to when the convention season begins and ends. -30 is 30 days before the first convention starts, +30 is 30 days after the second convention finishes.
  
• The gap in the middle is because polls during and immediately after the conventions are left out, since the authors found they’re messy and not particularly predictive. (They examine polling in this period more closely in other charts in their book.)
  

So what you see in the image is that polling two weeks after convention season wraps up (+14 on the X-axis) is dramatically more predictive of the eventual outcome than any polling beforehand.
That is — whatever happens during the convention period tends to last. "Most influences on vote intentions during these periods leave permanent imprints that survive to Election Day," the authors write.
Whoever’s leading the polls at this point usually ends up winning
Indeed, the authors looked at general election contests going back to 1952, and found that the candidate who was in the lead two weeks after the conventions ended went on to win the popular vote every single time.
Yup, you read that right. In all 16 of the most recent elections, the popular vote winner was the candidate who was ahead around this point in the campaign season.
Now, it would be a mistake to treat this as an iron law, or to conclude that nothing else in the campaign will matter, for a few reasons:

• Some of those races did end up getting much closer in the closing months, and could have conceivably tipped the other way with a few more points of change.
  
• Al Gore ended up losing the presidency despite winning the popular vote.
  
• The data set starts right after the infamous polling miss in 1948, when (cruder) polls showed Thomas Dewey defeating Harry Truman.
  
• And there’s always the possibility, however small, for some historically unusual major news event — a scandal, a terror attack, an economic crisis — to scramble things in a way we don’t usually see.
  

Still, Erikson and Wlezien’s research shows that conventions tend to have a consistent and profoundly important impact of the type that’s hardly ever observed at any other brief phase of the campaign, even those much-hyped fall debates.
"Once the conventions are over, further campaign events — even presidential debates— rarely result in dramatic change," they write in a 2012 update to their book. And if Hillary Clinton’s current lead holds up in the next few days of polls, that will be comforting news for her and Democrats.

What are people's thoughts? Will most of the chaos in the Middle East calm down as the 4T comes to an end, rendering Arab countries relatively safe to visit as a tourist the way most of Southeast Asia and Latin America is safe to visit today?

While it's patently obvious that the actions of the *West* have bred much resentment in the Arab world, it should be said that Arab culture is in many ways a violent culture, even on a micro scale, and this has nothing to do with Islam. After all, look at Indonesia or much of sub-Saharan Africa. Arabs, especially Arab men, are often quite belligerent people, in a way that Latinos and SE Asians are not. It's intrinsic Arab culture, regardless of religion, and the treatment of women goes hand-in-hand with that. Just walking in the street in Paris, where I live, I'll often get 'looks' from random North African men in the street, like "look at that white boy over there..." without my even doing anything. The so-called "Islamic treatment" of women is not a Muslim thing but an Arab one. So one could say that Arab belligerence is the byproduct of Western oppression, but then why don't Latinos, sub-Saharan Africans, and Southeast Asians act this way? May the explanation not on some level lie in Arab culture. None of the actual terrorists are Persian or Turkish. Women are FAR more oppressed in countries *we're* allied with such as Saudi Arabia than they are in Iran. That is a fact.

I've been reading The Cave And The Light, Plato Versus Aristotle And The Struggle for The Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman, and I noticed that the themes of the book, the struggle between the intellectual and cultural legacies of Plato and Aristotle match very closely tho the discussions about "Dionysian/Advancement" and "Apollonian/Atonement" saecula.

According to the book the legacy of Plato represents the intuitive, inspirational, mystical, utopian, and dogmatic side of Western culture while Aristotle represents the empirical, logical, and worldly side. This seems to fit the double saeculum. In the Boomer and Romantic Awakenings we both see a revolt against the "crass" Aristotelian "materialism" of the previous saeculum.

One interesting bit I just read that should strike a chord with the Boomers here, where they are talking about the spiritual bankruptcy of Neoclassical art and the failure of the French Revolution:

Quote:What was needed instead was a revolution lead by poets and artists like Shelley and his friends. Then, he believed, humanity would achieve the future Kant had foreseen, a world of perpetual peace and harmony. Mankind would witness the overthrow of intellectual as well as political tyranny and the establishment of the rights of man and - with a nod to Mary Wollstonecraft - the rights of woman. The dream that haunted the Platonic imagination since St. Augustine, of an Eternal City united by love and equality and justice, would be realized with the poets (as opposed to God or the theologians) leading the way.

Rags posted this on the wrong thread, but it deserves its own. I saw a study not long ago that it's cities like mine, San Jose, San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, Boston, that are causing inequality in our country. That's because as people are priced out of these places, they move elsewhere and start pushing prices up there too.





It's like we are becoming a medieval society, based on land ownership, except a lot of the owners are absentee. Meanwhile life as we knew it and communities are being destroyed. When life is reduced to work, it becomes death. The opposite ought to happen. That smug real estate guy tells people to be smart and get more education; meanwhile prices keep going up so fast that soon even smart, educated people won't be able to afford anything except their rent or mortgage.

The ideology voiced by Classic Xer is the problem here. Even in SF, according to this film, they can't pass rent or housing price controls, even though the hall is filled to overflowing with folks who want them. Bernie is right; we need a revolution for government action to restore our country. This situation gives new meaning to the socialist-anarchist slogan "property is theft." It is becoming more and more true. We might soon hear, "Storm the Bastille, and set up the guillotine for these aristocrats!" And if we can't start that Revolution here in these ultra-blue cities, where can we?

Maybe it's summer vacations and other distractions like the Olympics.

In any case, the level of activity on these forums is really low.

I suppose the harsh reality is, it's difficult for these sorts of "old fashioned" internet forums to compete with social networking apps.

I hope this does not fizzle out.

I recently read a section of Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku. It provides a scientific explanation for economic crashes. Bubbles and crashes might not be very unexpected after all. Science is not uniform either. It comes in waves that go like this. A seminal breakthrough occurs which leads to a cascade of secondary innovations. This, in turn, leads to vast amounts of wealth which is reflected in the economy. As a result, a bubble forms leading to a crash. The seminal invention's heyday ironically happens after the crash.

The earliest example in the book is the Crash of 1850. The first scientific wave started when James Watt invented the modern steam engine. This triggered the Industrial Revolution. This eventually led to the creation of the locomotive. A lot of excess wealth was created as a result. It had to go somewhere. It went into locomotive stocks in the London Stock Exchange. A bubble formed as a result. Because the locomotive was still in its infancy, the bubble burst which led to a stock market crash in 1850, followed by a series of minicrashes. The railroad industry ended up maturing in the 1880s and 1890s, when the railroad was in its heyday.

The next crash mentioned is the one the triggered the Great Depression in 1929. A second scientific wave began in 1879 when Thomas Edison in the lightbulb. Another seminal invention was the car. It wasn't until 1913 that Henry Ford invented the assembly line and brought forth the Model T. The electric and automotive revolutions of Edison and Ford proliferated throughout the world, creating excess wealth. Like before, this wealth had to go somewhere. It went into utility and automotive stocks on the US Stock Exchange. An unsustainable bubble formed which burst in 1929. This led to the Great Depression. After the economy recovered, the paving and electrification of America and Europe took place in the 1950s and 1960s.

The last crash mentioned in the book is the Crash of 2008. The current scientific wave began as a result of the Space Race. It is the high tech revolution that gave us the computer and the Internet. The wealth created as a result of the digital revolution went into real estate creating the housing bubble which burst in 2008. The wiring and networking of the world has not happened yet. The heyday of the information revolution has yet to come.

In addition, Michio Kaku predicts the possibility of a fourth scientific wave. He suspects it will involve artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, telecommunications, and biotechnology. This will create excess wealth which leads to a bubble that is likely to burst in 2087 before the heyday of the revolution comes.

This should be interesting to talk about. What do you think?